The Closet
by LH-chan
Summary: Upon learning they're to be killed at the end of their stories, two characters escape their notebook to find and destroy their author's awful ideas. Complete farce, with many cameos: GundamW, Bebop, Yugioh, and many others. Light slash. (Complete!)
1. Preposterous Plotline

Author's Note: 

Well, here's a bit of oddball humor that wandered into my head the other day, decided it liked it there, and refused to wander back out until I wrote it down...so, here ya go. =^_^;=  
As for disclaimers, the characters of Reiko and Otome belong to me, as do Yami LH-chan, and the kitties (who are actually my real-life kitties), all others belong to their various owners, who are numerous, and know who they are (aka, not me =^_~=).   
  
  
  
The Closet  
LH-chan '02-'03   
  
  
It was a place of mystery, it was a place of chaos, it was a place of dustbunnies, it was...a bedroom, calm, quiet, and slightly messy. It was also empty, with the exception of two cats, one a blonde tabby and the other grey and white splotched, who slept on either side of a notebook with a big silver star on it's cover.  
With surprising suddenness—or, at least, what would have been surprising suddenness, if anyone other than the two sleeping kitties had been in the room—the cover of the notebook flew back, and with a rush of turning pages and a flash of bright light, two girls were standing in the room, looking perplexed.  
The kitties, despite all the light and noise, continued sleeping peacefully. 

"Wow...I can't believe that worked!" exclaimed the shorter of the two girls, a vaguely Asian looking teenager with short black hair and a rather violently hued school uniform. She looked perky enough to start bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet.  
"What the... Who are you?" exclaimed the taller girl, who wore an all-concealing garment of mottled tan and grey, which looked like a cross between a cloak and a trench coat, it's hood pulled up onto her head. Her manner was much more sedate, and, however shocked she may have been to have just appeared in the bedroom by jumping out of a notebook, she managed to convey it without losing all dignity.  
"I'm Hoshino Otome! Who are you?" piped the short, perky, girl.  
"I am Dokyouno Reiko," said the taller girl, still decidedly calmer, then, slowly. "Are you from a story too?"  
Otome nodded, in what Reiko guessed was supposed to be a somber manner, the girl's face seemed grimmer, but she still looked as though she was only just restraining herself from bouncing.  
"I'm from 'Protector Princess Yumeko.' Which story are you in?"  
"Project Neko," Reiko answered, remembering now what she'd jumped out of the book to do in the first place. "That LH-chan! I won't forgive her for what she's trying to do to me!"  
"Couldn't be worse than what she's trying to do to me," said Otome.  
"Yeah," said Reiko, in a manner, which, had she been present, LH-chan would have complained was really out of character, since Reiko is usually being broody and misunderstood. "Well, she's thinking of killing me at the end of my story."  
"She's thinking of killing me at the end of my story, too," said Otome, whose current state of character LH-chan wouldn't have complained about much at all.  
"She's going to blow me up in front of my best friend," said Reiko, shifting from conversation to mindless one-up-man ship.  
"Well, she gave my best friend uncontrollable psychic powers, so she can see me blow up from anywhere in the world," countered Otome.  
Reiko winced in sympathy; that was pretty bad.  
"Which brings me to the reason I tried to get out of the notebook," said Otome. "I've got to find out where she's keeping all her awful ideas and get rid of them before it's too late."  
"My thoughts exactly," said Reiko.  
"Y'know," said Otome, suddenly thoughtful, "we should probably start looking before LH-chan comes home." 

Reiko looked quite shocked, in an anime-girl sort of way, at this statement of the ignored obvious—which, once more, LH-chan would probably say was out of character, but, well, LH-chan is one dimensional and stupid sometimes.  
"So," Otome voiced the thousand dollar question, "where should we start looking?"  
"Hmm..." Reiko cast a critical eye around the room, taking in bed, desk, various bits of audio-visual equipment, stacks of anime DVD and manga, the pile of freshly washed laundry in the chair, the computer...  
Both Otome and Reiko eyed the computer dubiously, considering, but, frankly, neither of the girls was the brains of the outfit, as it were, in their respective stories, and, really, between the two of them, they'd probably have trouble operating a blender.  
"Er..." Otome ventured, "lets try the closet."  
"Yeah...good idea," said Reiko slowly. 

That decided, the two ill-fated characters, after a bit of trouble with the odd, homemade, and functionless for its true purpose, "cat-proof" latch, opened the closet doors and began to rifle through its contents, alternately naming, and dismissing, the things they threw from the messy closet into a pile on the floor.  
"Red kitty blanket."  
"No."  
"CD-R's."  
"No."  
"PlayStation games."  
"No."  
"OutlawStar DVD."  
"No."  
"Glass chessboard."  
"No."  
The sound of breaking glass rang out from the pile behind them.  
"Oh...crap..."  
"Why on Earth did you throw the glass chessboard?"  
"Sorry...sorry..."  
"We'd better look through this stuff faster...LH-chan will probably do even worse things to us if she finds out we've been breaking her stuff."  
"Worse than killing us?"  
"Yes! If anyone could do it, she could."  
Both girls shuddered, then continued their rifling at a higher speed. Remarkably, the kitties on the bed slept on, oblivious to the breaking glass and shouting.  
"Dreamcast, no."  
"Sega Genesis, no."  
"Dreamcast keyboard, no."  
"What's up with all the Sega hardware?"  
"I think I hit a fandom pocket."  
"Ooaah!" 

"Sonic plushie, no."  
"Rollerblades, no."  
"Oriental jewelry box, no."  
"Infinite rolling plastic drawers of doom, no."  
"The Hell?"  
"Sorry, the list was getting boring."  
"And so we stomp upon the broken remains of the fourth wall."  
"Redwall books, no."  
"Harry Potter books, no."  
"Duel Monsters cards, no."  
"Notebook with holographic lightning bolt on the cover, no...wait a second! This might be it!" 

Otome and Reiko stared forebodingly at the innocuous, and rather cool, looking notebook.  
"Should we open it?" asked Otome.  
"The horrible things contained within its pages could happen to us the moment we open the cover," said Reiko.  
"But this is what we came here to do," said Otome. "So we've gotta do it!"  
Both of the girls, each being the tragic hero who lives by her ideals no matter what, in their respective stories, found that they could not disagree with that logic. Tentatively, they reached toward the cover, and, together, they opened the notebook.  
The second flash of light and rustling of pages that failed to wake the kitties on the bed filled the room. 


	2. Insufferable Fangirl

When the spots before their eyes cleared, Otome and Reiko saw two boys, one, with short, dark hair who wore a loose tank top and tight shorts, and the other, with a long, dark braid, who seemed to be wearing extremely out of date pants and a priest collar. They were kissing.  
Reiko stared. Behind her, Otome screamed.  
Startled, Reiko whirled around to see what had happened behind them that could have possibly distracted Otome's attention from what was _in front_ of them.  
But, Otome had already moved, she was behind Reiko once more, hovering inches from the boys, who were staring at her wide-eyed.  
It had not been a scream of shock, or terror, it had been a fangirl scream. 

"You're Heero Yuy! And Duo Maxwell! From GundamWing! And you are a couple! I knew it!" Otome exclaimed.  
"Actually," said Duo, looking around in a manner that suggested, perhaps, that he had jumped out of some other fan-author's notebook at some other time. "We were never a couple _in_ GundamWing. This particular writer," he nudged the notebook, which had fallen to the floor, with his toe for emphasis, "just happens to be the kind who likes to write us as a couple." 

"Not that I mind," he added, kissing Heero on the cheek."  
Heero smiled. "Our battles in the series were much harder than any that she's ever written us into, and at the end of hers, we're never lonely."  
"Well," huffed Reiko, looking entirely displeased with these cheerful victims of LH-chan's writing, "we're her original characters, and she plans to _kill us_, so we need to find out where she keeps her awful ideas and get rid of them before it's too late."  
Otome nodded her agreement, still looking rather star-struck over the Gundam boys.  
Duo shrugged. "I haven't seen any awful ideas in our pages, but there's lots of other stuff in that book besides stories about Heero and I. I'd keep looking, if I were you."  
"Fine," said Reiko firmly, and picked up the book, flipping pages until, with a little wave from Duo, the Gundam boys disappeared.  
"Aww...did you have to do that so soon?" Otome whined.  
Reiko stared open mouthed at the other girl, notebook pages slowly slipping from her hand, but before she could say anything, she was interrupted by the third burst of sound and light that didn't wake the kitties that day.  
A tall, green haired, man stood in the room, blinking in a perplexed sort of way.  
Much to Reiko's complete disbelief, Otome squealed with delight.  
"Spike Spiegel! From Cowboy Bebop!" she exclaimed. 

"Seriously...Spike? Who names their kid Spike?" asked Reiko incredulously.  
Both Otome and Spike shrugged, and Reiko restrained the urge to beat her head against the wall.  
"We're trying to find LH-chan's cruel ideas and get rid of them before they do more damage," Otome was explaining to Spike. "We asked Heero and Duo, back at the beginning of the notebook, but they hadn't seen any cruel ideas at all. Have you seen any?"  
Spike nodded. "Sure have."  
"Really!" exclaimed Reiko, excited that this very pointless search might actually be going somewhere after all.  
"Really," said Spike, "she's written more stories about me than any other character, and every time I'm either injured, or suffering some sort of psychological torment. I've been forced to relive my own death so many times I can recite it by heart!"  
He seemed as though he had been waiting to say this for a very long time.  
"And," he continued, picking up the model figure of himself from a shelf inside the closet, "this doesn't look like me at all."  
He picked up another item from behind where the figure had been sitting: a CD box with his picture on the cover, in the picture, he wore a fedora.  
"And I'd never wear that hat."  
"Er...can you really say that?" asked Otome. "I mean, it's official merchandise, so haven't you, er, technically already worn the hat...and doesn't the figure have to look like you?"  
"Like I know," said Spike. "I just call it like I see it."  
He tossed the figure and CD box into the pile of things the girls had already thrown out of the closet, where they landed on top of the broken glass chessboard and the, possibly also broken, Dreamcast.  
"Argh!" growled Reiko, quite literally. "We aren't getting anywhere, and we don't know how much time we have left!"  
"Then don't stand there talking to me," said Spike, "keep looking through this book. It just keeps getting worse from here." 

Spurred on by Spike's rather dubious encouragement, Reiko and Otome continued flipping through the notebook, accompanied by flashes of light and sound, and brief encounters with various psychologically traumatized characters: An inconsolable, pink-haired, naked, girl; a broody boy with white-feathered wings; and, strangely, an anthromorphic squirrel, who was screaming quite loudly.  
Reiko quickly turned the pages until the screaming squirrel returned to the notebook. "What was all that?" she asked shakily.  
"Tenjou Utena from Revolution Girl Utena, Van Fanel from Escaflowne, and..." Otome looked thoughtful for a moment, the third answer not coming as easily as the previous two, "...I think, Sally Acorn from the American Sonic the Hedgehog TV series."  
"How the Hell do you know all that?" asked Reiko.  
Otome shrugged. "LH-chan wrote me as an insufferable fangirl."  
"Ooaah!" said Reiko, flipping through a group of blank pages toward the back of the notebook. "I think the rest might be empty...oh!"  
As she spoke, there was another flash of light and rustle of pages, and a short boy with vivid golden and magenta hair was standing in the room.  
The kitties, surprising no one at this point, slept, peacefully, on.  
"Aaaah! Yami Yuugi!" exclaimed Otome, bounding over to him, and actually hugging him around the neck.  
"Ya...mi... Yuu...gi?" said Reiko slowly. "Dark Game? That's an even stranger name than Spike."  
"That's just his fangirl name," explained Otome, still hanging on the boy's neck, "he's really the spirit of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh who doesn't remember his real name."  
"Ooaah!" said Reiko, then, annoyed. "That, is needlessly bizarre."  
"Fine," said Otome, releasing the boy at last, "just call him Yugioh then, like the name of the series."  
"That," said Reiko, further annoyed at the realization that they had been arguing over the guy's name, rather than searching before their time ran out, "is even more needlessly bizarre." 

"Er," said Yugioh, looking perplexed—but perplexed in a dignified sort of way, because, well, this _is_ Yugioh, "what's going on?"  
"We're looking for LH-chan's cruel ideas," Reiko explained the preposterous plotline for the zillionth time since this ridiculous adventure began. "Have you seen any?"  
"Plenty," said Yugioh, still dignified, but distinctly rumpled around the edges. "She's been doing cruel things to me, and my partner, from the start. The UST she's inserted between me and...almost everyone I've ever known, is stifling!"  
Otome giggled. "I can't believe Yugioh said 'UST.'"  
Reiko once again fought the urge to beat her head against the wall.  
"I can't believe..."  
She let the sentence hang, unfinished. With this level of absurdity, nearly anything could fill in the blank. 

"The rest of this notebook is stories from my series," Yugioh ventured; having found himself in a situation he couldn't think of a suitable game to play his way out of, the Game King was, ironically, puzzled.  
"Perhaps..." he continued bravely, "you should check some of the other notebooks."  
He picked up a spiral-bound book from the desk, where it had been lying beside the computer, completely unnoticed by the ill-fated girls at the beginning of their search. 

Reiko's emotions fought a brief but brutal battle, between pleasure at having direction in their, thus far, fruitless search, and irritation that they had done all that digging through LH-chan's closet, and needlessly broken so many of LH-chan's things, when there was a notebook sitting right on the desk where they had been looking.  
Pleasure won the day, as Reiko figured she may very well be closer to the end of this adventure, and, thus, may as well look pleased about anything which might get her to that end faster.  
Otome, for her part, just stood off to the side, looking thoughtful.  
_There's something,_ she thought, _that's not quite right about that book._  
"Well, lets open it and find out what's inside," said Reiko, gesturing to Yugioh.  
He nodded, and pulled back the cover.  
"Guys," Otome started, trying to voice her concern about the book's suspicious nature.  
Suddenly, she realized what was wrong with the book, and her eyes went wide as she exclaimed:  
"Wait! That's not a notebook..."  
But it was too late, the pages rustled...  
"...it's a..."  
...the light flashed...  
"...sketchbook!"  
...and the three characters were joined by a fourth. 


	3. Dropping Plotbunnies

"Hi, hi!" exclaimed the fourth character, a blonde, vaguely goth, grey-eared cat-girl.  
"Aaaah! Yami LH-chan!" exclaimed Reiko and Otome in unison.  
"Yami...LH-chan?" asked Yugioh slowly, thinking that, perhaps, he was in a little over his head.  
"She's...she's....LH-chan's most powerful muse!" exclaimed Otome.  
"Muse?" asked Yugioh. "You mean the mythological creature who gives artists and writers their ideas?"  
"Uh, huh," muttered Reiko, looking rather horrorstruck.  
"You do realize then, that means she's what you've been looking for all this time," said Yugioh, watching the strange muse-girl—who was currently floating in mid-air, and staring at them goggle-eyed—with mounting concern. She looked like a small, and rather cute, snake, ready to strike. 

Reiko blinked, still staring at Yami LH-chan. "Uh, oh...he's right."  
"Yeah," agreed Otome nervously.  
Yami LH-chan cocked her head, still staring, then grinned broadly.  
"Wow! Characters escaping their books...I'll definitely have to drop this to LH-chan as a plotbunny later!"  
"Oh, please don't," muttered Reiko.  
"Awww...why not?" asked Yami LH-chan, standing now, instead of floating, still staring. "If you're in more stories, you get to live longer."  
"If...if you wouldn't kill us," ventured Otome, "we'd live longer, too."  
"Gotta kill you," stated Yami LH-chan, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. "Your characters spoke to me and told me so."  
She said the last part in a rather fake sounding spooky voice.  
"Now wait a second!" exclaimed Reiko, unable to believe what she was hearing. "We're speaking to you _right now_, and telling you _not_ to kill us!"  
"That doesn't count," said the muse.  
Reiko's mouth hung open in shock.  
"But..." started Otome, stepping forward to stand beside Reiko. 

Yami LH-chan stared at them, head cocked, once more.  
"You two look good together," said the muse in a dreamy voice. "I bet I could come up with a way to slash you...maybe a plotless lemon, or something."  
Reiko looked like she might scream.  
"Um, Reiko," said Otome slowly, "I think we're giving her ideas by just standing here."  
"You think we should run?" asked Reiko.  
"Awww, don't! I bet if I watch you longer I can come up with all sorts of things for you to do!" whined Yami LH-chan.  
That settled the matter; with a collective gasp of horror, the ill-fated girls disappeared back into the pages of their notebook.  
"Awww," Yami LH-chan whined. 

Unfortunately for him, this turn of events left Yugioh alone with the muse.  
"Er...you play Duel Monsters?" he asked warily.  
"Not now," said Yami LH-chan excitedly, "too many ideas."  
"Any of them about me?" hazarded Yugioh.  
"Not yet...but hang around for a little while...I'll come up with some," muttered the muse, now making notes in a small notebook she had produced from thin air.  
"Er...right...thanks," muttered Yugioh.   
Not only did he recognize a fortunate opportunity for escape, but he was also smart enough to use it; quickly, he retreated to his own notebook while Yami LH-chan was distracted.  
"So many cameos," muttered Yami LH-chan. "This is so great! I can't wait to drop this plotbunny!"  
And with that, the muse disappeared in one last burst of light and sound, leaving the room empty once more. 

Empty, except for the two cats, who slept on, oblivious to everything that had gone one around them.  
In a few hours, LH-chan, with many new ideas in her head, would see the mess the characters left behind, scream in horror, and wonder how two sweet little kitties could cause so much damage; before kissing each of them on the head and cleaning up the mess, bemoaning the fate of her chessboard all the while.  
The kitties, for their part, would wonder why she was so upset.  
After all, it was just a dream.   
  
  
  
Owari. 


End file.
